Where does the money go now?

They're not paying for NOLA Patrol anymore. So are the hoteliers just paying for details now?

Though launched to high hopes and backed by roughly $800,000 in hotel/motel self-assessment tax revenue, NOLA Patrol seemed to quickly fizzle.

Choosing to free up some cash to help pay for NOPD details with the Sidney-Torres created French Quarter Task Force, the city limited the patrol's total force to 20 people – and froze hiring to replace attrition while in the one-year pilot stage.

Quality of life enforcement

Uh oh. Sounds like the neighborhood association wanted a noise ordinance enforced.

Officers responded to a disturbance around 7:15 p.m. Friday at a community pool in the northern section of the expansive Craig Ranch subdivision. Residents and a private security officer called police to complain that several teenagers did not have permission to use the pool and had refused to leave, police said. The pool is part of the residential community.

Several people complained that the teenagers had started fighting. Three officers arrived and found a large, rowdy crowd. The department dispatched nine additional officers to respond to the incident, Conley said.

“Any time you confront a large group of people, it’s a very dynamic situation and tensions can rise very quickly,” he said.

And you know what happens when "tensions rise" is you get cops pulling guns on teenagers and throwing young girls to the ground by their hair.



Imagine if we, in New Orleans, ever got the idea that certain kinds of young people didn't belong in certain neighborhoods.

But youth advocates -- including Joshua Perry, the head of the juvenile public defender's office in New Orleans -- say it is a virtual certainty that curfew enforcement lopsidedly targets poor, African-American children. Remarkably, the New Orleans Police Department, which has been criticized by the federal Justice Department for racial profiling, says it does not keep track of the race of the children it arrests.

Some data is available, however, and it suggests curfew critics could have a point. In 2011, 93 percent of youths detained at the city's curfew center were African-American, according to statistics from the Orleans Parish Sheriff's Office that were provided to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune by the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana.

Imagine, also, if we created a special, public-privately funded, "quality of life" police force to go around enforcing such a measure. What would that look like?

Members of the city's new civilian police force, the NOLA Patrol, will begin working in the French Quarter Monday (May 18).

The group, which went through 200 hours of training over five weeks, will handle quality-of-life violations and other non-emergency tasks, freeing up an understaffed New Orleans Police Department to focus on more serious crimes.

If you're having a pool party in the Quarter, make sure you review the guest list closely.

Let's (not) be cops (yet)

City Council, yesterday, deferred a vote on whether to approve the proposed "NOLA Patrol" not-cop initiative.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s plan to bolster law enforcement in the French Quarter with a new corps of uniformed civilians has divided the neighborhood into familiar factions, with resident groups largely in favor of the idea and Bourbon Street business owners pushing back.

The New Orleans City Council decided Thursday to defer voting on the plan until its next meeting but not before major French Quarter groups got a chance to weigh in on the proposal, dubbed “Nola Patrol.”

The idea is to put 50 unarmed recruits on the streets to enforce traffic, zoning and other rules, freeing up police officers to handle more serious violations and to respond to emergencies like the Bourbon Street shooting that rattled the neighborhood this summer.

Remember this was the plan by which the city wants to allow "neighborhood businesses" (read: downtown hotels) to privately fund their own quasi-police force. Because what could possibly go wrong with that? 

Ok calm down. They're unarmed which makes them slightly better than that "French Quarter Minutemen" idea  that one crazy person had. On the other hand, they're supposed to focus on "traffic, zoning and other rules," which makes them ten times more annoying.

Anyway, it's probably a good idea to defer this dress-up like cops idea until after Halloween is over. It also does this.

Andy Kopplin, the city’s chief administrative officer, said the council’s decision to push back a vote on the plan means the patrols may not be in place by Mardi Gras, as originally planned.

But, for the same reasons, that makes perfect sense too.